Chinese tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced aggressive price cuts for products and services from its cloud computing division as it looks to seize a larger market share of the country’s cloud market.

The company on Wednesday revealed price cuts of up to 50 per cent in cloud services. Prices for elastic computing services which use Arm and Intel-based chips have decreased by 15-20 per cent, while services using Nvidia’s V1000 and T4 graphics processing units have dropped by between 41-47 per cent.

Alibaba was one of the first entrants into China’s cloud computing market, and currently has a share of more than a third of the market. The company however has in recent years faced intensifying competition from other domestic players such as China Telecom and China Unicorn.

This is the first major announcement from Alibaba Cloud since the overall group’s split in March. In the biggest restructure in its history, Alibaba last month announced plans to split into six business groups, each with their own chief executive officer and board of directors and the ability to raise outside funding.

Elsewhere in China, the country's financial hub of Shanghai has announced plans to promote investments in specialised technologies such as chip design, circuitry and artificial intelligence.

A statement from the government said that the city would provide investment help for certain qualified semiconductor projects with up to $14.47 million in support.

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